I remember once having a lucid dream and the "physics" were completely broken. First I checked if this was really a dream by hopping, and while jumping up seemed quite realistic, descending was a bit like a falling balloon filled with ordinary air (really slow). Oh, and the lights didn't work:-) Anyway, I wanted to have some fun and threw my dog out of the window (about 15 meters above ground level), it landed without injuring itself and climbed up the drainpipe back inside. People were as dumb as bots in Half-Life and stuff like elevators either didn't work or worked in a very simplified way. So the physics are a lot worse than in modern games and social interaction is just as bad. Probably has something to do with the brain working in "low-power" mode. On the other hand, I was able to understand that the world was simulated (badly), and that means the brain was expecting stuff to behave differently, probably doing simulation some other way as well.
Actually everything, including the codecs and the browser are already installed. Unlocking is acheived by installing a 1.5 Kb license file which is unique for every serial number.
I've watched Steve Jobs's iMac G4 introduction (http://youtube.com/watch?v=cMV6glb23kg) and he told that they believe that a PC targeted an Joe Sixpack should be all-in-one. Not because it's cheaper (it's actually more expensive to design) or it looks nice, but because it's easier to setup and doesn't leave twenty cables on the desk. Now, if only Apple offered iMac's hardware in a MacPro-like chassis...
Re:Will Tk Widgets Now Integrate?
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Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Released
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It works well with MacOS X and Windows, but what about Linux? Most Linux apps use GTK, or gtk bindings to some other language, or the GTK theme (like Swing in Java 6). And these screenshots show nothing more than a nicer theme on Linux. And no font antialiasing or hinting!
I remember that in early 2006 KDE 4 was promised to be released about the same time as Vista, or even earlier. But at least the KDE team didn't spend three years writing stuff and then completely dumping it and starting from scratch!
And it saves the time to downconvert it by hand if it can be done on the fly (though if you have a transfer app, you should just use that). But what about power? Scaling images is quite a CPU-hungry task, I think it would reduce battery running time by at least 20%.
I hesitate to suggest this since they seem incapable of getting even simple things right, but replace SIM cards with SD cards (they're effectively a commodity now, $20 for 2GB). Poof, instant long-play pocket audio recorder! SIM cards are more than simply memory. They store a bunch of encryption keys; but the keys are NOT transferred into the phone and a lot of encryption is done on the SIM card, so technically it's a very simple processor. It's done so that someone doesn't steal your phone, clone the SIM card, assign any PIN they like and get "free" calls as well as a "free" phone. Oh, and most modern phones (except really cheap ones) have an SD, miniSD or microSD slot.
The ability to turn the volume up or down in a wider scale than they give us. Most phones have a speakerphone mode that makes it really loud; turn it on but turn down the volume, this way it'll be louder than normal but not deafening.
The phone to tell me what the hell it's doing signal-wise. It may be anything, including the carrier. For example here in Russia most prepaid contracts (having a $5-$10 monthly ARPU) have a much lower priority and their calls are dropped or rejected if network load exceeding limits; they are also switched into half-duplex mode when bandwidth is needed for something more important. I think that "bars" are lowered if the signal is too noisy.
A phone that doesn't fucking break. My Siemens phone got chewed by a dog, its screen (the protective glass, not the display itself) now has a hole in it (because of the dog), the battery is dead because of awful handling (but still lasts a day or two), I opened it twice just to look inside and it was dropped a million times. Everything (except the battery) works perfectly! My new phone is a Sony Ericsson and I've never had any problems with it yet.
I think this will be no more than toy - BIOS manufacturers often introduce neat features that are dropped and forgotten. For example: - Ancient versions of AMIBIOS had a Windows 3.11-like mouse-operated GUI (I had one on a 486 PC purchased in 1995). It was a lot easier to use than "modern" text-based BIOSes in 2007. And if the computer had no mouse, you could use the keyboard for navigation. - I bought an ASUS motherboard about six years ago and it had a feature that spoke about any failures, e.g. no video card or bad memory, instead cryptic beeps that are common today.
Besides, phones and PDAs are "boot" faster not because the initialization procedure is faster (my PDA boots in about 30 seconds) but because they sleep instead of powering off.
Visual Studio 2005 does all that, and also really cool stuff borrowed from Office - like a (non-annoying!) smart tag that offers to do refactoring if you rename some variable or function. Or a feature that shows useful information on critical runtime errors - e.g. which pointer caused a segfault and a link to MSDN explaining what a segfault actually is. And I've never seen Visual Studio use more that 80 megs of RAM (even though some parts are managed code), while Eclipse's typical RAM usage on my PC is well above 250 megs. And line-counting? A CPU-hungry task? I've seen Borland Pascal do that on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM and no harddrive (loaded everything from a Samba server).
I assembled my PC in summer and it cost me about $1000. Core 2 Duo 2.0 Ghz/1 gig of RAM/Radeon x1600 512Mb/500gig hard drive/20" widescreen monitor. And I didn't exactly buy the cheapest stuff out there. An iMac 17" Core 2 Duo 2GHz/1GB/160GB/SuperDrive/X1600 costs about $1700 where I live (that's Apple's official price). And it has a few other things like an integrated video camera or Bluetooth which cost about $200 (total). So I guess the extra $500 means is that everything's integrated in a nice package (read throw away a working monitor after an upgrade), and you get Mac OS X.
I never have experienced any "outages" of Office installed on my desktop. Have you? Software can be broken too. Like a registry key (or DLL) that gets deleted/broken when installing an Office extension/generic app/game/whatever. In fact network outages are mostly caused by software bugs and not hardware failures. However software usually works fast while web apps make you wait even for simple actions, especially if anything between you and the server (hundreds of kilometers away!) gets overloaded.
If you have a relatively new system with automatic fan control (late Pentium 4, Pentium D or any Core), you'll definetly hear if it's wasting power:-) And desktop Cores can actually lower their frequency when CPU load is low.
It's an iPaq hx2750 (or hx2790, I don't remember). It has a fingerprint scanner, wifi and bluetooth and it seems to be searching for drivers for the wireless modules. Icons also take ages to load, often opening a directory with a large *.exe, like Bejeweled, takes about 10-20 seconds.
My PDA boots in about 30 seconds, and it doesn't have a harddrive. Booting isn't just loading stuff from a drive, it's hundreds of tests like - hardware changes - hardware initialization (e.g. loading firmware) - searching for drivers - applications acquiring and releasing resources and checking for stuff like library versions, user names etc. That's why BIOS initialization often takes time, and yet it works even if the system has no drives.
The only way this would work is hibernating, but hardware would still need to be initialized.
Their development libraries are much, much worse. To write an app that takes a frame from a video and saves it in a *.BMP file I had to download 1) Visual Studio (something like 2.5 gigs) 2) Windows SDK (another gigabyte); I need about 5 files from it (ten megabytes) 3) DirectX SDK (about 500 megs) - because DirectShow SDK was moved from DirectX to Windows SDK but still needs DirectX SDK to compile.
That's FOUR GIGABYTES just to use a couple of functions! Visual Studio can be replaced with some light compiler (like VC++ Express) but that's still an about 1.7 gigabytes total.
In Linux, GCC+Eclipse+Java+gstreamer-dev would be an about 200-300 megs download.
I've used Netbeans and Eclipse and found out that the typical memory usage for Netbeans is 80-120 megs while Eclipse uses about 150-250 (once it was even 350 megs!). The more memory is used, the less is available for other applications and using Firefox with Eclipse on 512 megs of RAM is SLOW, especially if I'm reading a 200-page RFC in Firefox while something is compiling (another memory-hungry task). I guess the latest JVM (6) has finally made Swing work as fast as SWT. It also seems that Eclipse's text editor has a more advanced highlighting engine that takes a lot of time to parse the code and while it is being parsed the IDE locks up. E.g. static methods are displayed in italics and that means every method has to be checked if it's static.
The problem is that it's easier simply not to drag windows that are about to disappear than - create a Bugzilla account - spend a lot of time searching which category the bug belongs to - fill out a lot of fields, like priority etc.
I find writing an email easier, and besides this way I can do bet-i'll-crash-your-gnome-not-even-using-the-keyboard tricks:-)
I'm using the default Gnome (2.18.1) in Ubuntu 7.04. I made a clean test: booted from the ubuntu live CD and performed the steps you described. Gnome didn't crash completely, but the screen flickered and gnome-power-manager disappeared from the tray and moved itself into a small window. Then I tried to do the same, but with gnome-terminal it was a bit worse: restoring took more time and the panels flickered a bit more. I also tried this on another PC and it seems the crash is more visible when there's not much free RAM and CPU. For example on a Celeron 1.4Ghz with 512 megs of RAM (and Eclipse, Firefox, Thunderbird and 4 gnome-terminals running) recovery takes about 15 seconds.
It works with Eclipse as well as Abiword. 1) Start dragging a splash screen in the pager onto a different desktop 2) Don't drop it, just make sure it's about to be dropped on another desktop when you release the mouse button 3) Wait until it's gone (loading compete) 4) Release the mouse button
My favorite GNOME bug is this: dragging a window onto a different desktop using the pager. If the window is an ordinary one, that's OK. But if it's a splash screen (or a window that closes itself after some time), if the window closes while is is being dragged, the whole GNOME desktop segfaults.
Sometimes Pidgin's glitches making funny stuff happen: my ICQ avatar frequently gets replaced with a photo of some girl - and I've never seen her! I searched my computer for ALL image files and didn't find anything even remotely resembling that avatar.
It's also a great solution if your system doesn't have a DVD reader. I remember installing Ubuntu from an USB thumbdrive (assembeled myself a new computer and didn't have any money to buy a DVD drive) and preparing the drive for installation was a pain in the ass, not to mention that the BIOS refused booting from it 3 out of five times.
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I remember once having a lucid dream and the "physics" were completely broken. First I checked if this was really a dream by hopping, and while jumping up seemed quite realistic, descending was a bit like a falling balloon filled with ordinary air (really slow). Oh, and the lights didn't work :-)
Anyway, I wanted to have some fun and threw my dog out of the window (about 15 meters above ground level), it landed without injuring itself and climbed up the drainpipe back inside. People were as dumb as bots in Half-Life and stuff like elevators either didn't work or worked in a very simplified way.
So the physics are a lot worse than in modern games and social interaction is just as bad. Probably has something to do with the brain working in "low-power" mode. On the other hand, I was able to understand that the world was simulated (badly), and that means the brain was expecting stuff to behave differently, probably doing simulation some other way as well.
Actually everything, including the codecs and the browser are already installed. Unlocking is acheived by installing a 1.5 Kb license file which is unique for every serial number.
I've watched Steve Jobs's iMac G4 introduction (http://youtube.com/watch?v=cMV6glb23kg) and he told that they believe that a PC targeted an Joe Sixpack should be all-in-one. Not because it's cheaper (it's actually more expensive to design) or it looks nice, but because it's easier to setup and doesn't leave twenty cables on the desk.
Now, if only Apple offered iMac's hardware in a MacPro-like chassis...
It works well with MacOS X and Windows, but what about Linux? Most Linux apps use GTK, or gtk bindings to some other language, or the GTK theme (like Swing in Java 6). And these screenshots show nothing more than a nicer theme on Linux. And no font antialiasing or hinting!
I remember that in early 2006 KDE 4 was promised to be released about the same time as Vista, or even earlier. But at least the KDE team didn't spend three years writing stuff and then completely dumping it and starting from scratch!
Oh, and most modern phones (except really cheap ones) have an SD, miniSD or microSD slot. The ability to turn the volume up or down in a wider scale than they give us. Most phones have a speakerphone mode that makes it really loud; turn it on but turn down the volume, this way it'll be louder than normal but not deafening. The phone to tell me what the hell it's doing signal-wise. It may be anything, including the carrier. For example here in Russia most prepaid contracts (having a $5-$10 monthly ARPU) have a much lower priority and their calls are dropped or rejected if network load exceeding limits; they are also switched into half-duplex mode when bandwidth is needed for something more important. I think that "bars" are lowered if the signal is too noisy. A phone that doesn't fucking break. My Siemens phone got chewed by a dog, its screen (the protective glass, not the display itself) now has a hole in it (because of the dog), the battery is dead because of awful handling (but still lasts a day or two), I opened it twice just to look inside and it was dropped a million times. Everything (except the battery) works perfectly! My new phone is a Sony Ericsson and I've never had any problems with it yet.
Here's a screenshot of AMI's WinBios: http://www.pucpr.edu/facultad/apagan/images/BIOS8.GIF
And besides, it seems that BIOS is going to be replaced with EFI.
I think this will be no more than toy - BIOS manufacturers often introduce neat features that are dropped and forgotten.
For example:
- Ancient versions of AMIBIOS had a Windows 3.11-like mouse-operated GUI (I had one on a 486 PC purchased in 1995). It was a lot easier to use than "modern" text-based BIOSes in 2007. And if the computer had no mouse, you could use the keyboard for navigation.
- I bought an ASUS motherboard about six years ago and it had a feature that spoke about any failures, e.g. no video card or bad memory, instead cryptic beeps that are common today.
Besides, phones and PDAs are "boot" faster not because the initialization procedure is faster (my PDA boots in about 30 seconds) but because they sleep instead of powering off.
Visual Studio 2005 does all that, and also really cool stuff borrowed from Office - like a (non-annoying!) smart tag that offers to do refactoring if you rename some variable or function. Or a feature that shows useful information on critical runtime errors - e.g. which pointer caused a segfault and a link to MSDN explaining what a segfault actually is. And I've never seen Visual Studio use more that 80 megs of RAM (even though some parts are managed code), while Eclipse's typical RAM usage on my PC is well above 250 megs.
And line-counting? A CPU-hungry task? I've seen Borland Pascal do that on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM and no harddrive (loaded everything from a Samba server).
I assembled my PC in summer and it cost me about $1000. Core 2 Duo 2.0 Ghz/1 gig of RAM/Radeon x1600 512Mb/500gig hard drive/20" widescreen monitor. And I didn't exactly buy the cheapest stuff out there.
An iMac 17" Core 2 Duo 2GHz/1GB/160GB/SuperDrive/X1600 costs about $1700 where I live (that's Apple's official price). And it has a few other things like an integrated video camera or Bluetooth which cost about $200 (total). So I guess the extra $500 means is that everything's integrated in a nice package (read throw away a working monitor after an upgrade), and you get Mac OS X.
If you have a relatively new system with automatic fan control (late Pentium 4, Pentium D or any Core), you'll definetly hear if it's wasting power :-)
And desktop Cores can actually lower their frequency when CPU load is low.
It's an iPaq hx2750 (or hx2790, I don't remember). It has a fingerprint scanner, wifi and bluetooth and it seems to be searching for drivers for the wireless modules. Icons also take ages to load, often opening a directory with a large *.exe, like Bejeweled, takes about 10-20 seconds.
My PDA boots in about 30 seconds, and it doesn't have a harddrive. Booting isn't just loading stuff from a drive, it's hundreds of tests like
- hardware changes
- hardware initialization (e.g. loading firmware)
- searching for drivers
- applications acquiring and releasing resources and checking for stuff like library versions, user names etc.
That's why BIOS initialization often takes time, and yet it works even if the system has no drives.
The only way this would work is hibernating, but hardware would still need to be initialized.
Their development libraries are much, much worse. To write an app that takes a frame from a video and saves it in a *.BMP file I had to download
1) Visual Studio (something like 2.5 gigs)
2) Windows SDK (another gigabyte); I need about 5 files from it (ten megabytes)
3) DirectX SDK (about 500 megs) - because DirectShow SDK was moved from DirectX to Windows SDK but still needs DirectX SDK to compile.
That's FOUR GIGABYTES just to use a couple of functions! Visual Studio can be replaced with some light compiler (like VC++ Express) but that's still an about 1.7 gigabytes total.
In Linux, GCC+Eclipse+Java+gstreamer-dev would be an about 200-300 megs download.
I've used Netbeans and Eclipse and found out that the typical memory usage for Netbeans is 80-120 megs while Eclipse uses about 150-250 (once it was even 350 megs!). The more memory is used, the less is available for other applications and using Firefox with Eclipse on 512 megs of RAM is SLOW, especially if I'm reading a 200-page RFC in Firefox while something is compiling (another memory-hungry task).
I guess the latest JVM (6) has finally made Swing work as fast as SWT.
It also seems that Eclipse's text editor has a more advanced highlighting engine that takes a lot of time to parse the code and while it is being parsed the IDE locks up. E.g. static methods are displayed in italics and that means every method has to be checked if it's static.
The problem is that it's easier simply not to drag windows that are about to disappear than
:-)
- create a Bugzilla account
- spend a lot of time searching which category the bug belongs to
- fill out a lot of fields, like priority etc.
I find writing an email easier, and besides this way I can do bet-i'll-crash-your-gnome-not-even-using-the-keyboard tricks
I'm using the default Gnome (2.18.1) in Ubuntu 7.04.
I made a clean test: booted from the ubuntu live CD and performed the steps you described. Gnome didn't crash completely, but the screen flickered and gnome-power-manager disappeared from the tray and moved itself into a small window. Then I tried to do the same, but with gnome-terminal it was a bit worse: restoring took more time and the panels flickered a bit more. I also tried this on another PC and it seems the crash is more visible when there's not much free RAM and CPU. For example on a Celeron 1.4Ghz with 512 megs of RAM (and Eclipse, Firefox, Thunderbird and 4 gnome-terminals running) recovery takes about 15 seconds.
It works with Eclipse as well as Abiword.
1) Start dragging a splash screen in the pager onto a different desktop
2) Don't drop it, just make sure it's about to be dropped on another desktop when you release the mouse button
3) Wait until it's gone (loading compete)
4) Release the mouse button
GNOME crashes, but then restarts itself.
My favorite GNOME bug is this: dragging a window onto a different desktop using the pager.
If the window is an ordinary one, that's OK. But if it's a splash screen (or a window that closes itself after some time), if the window closes while is is being dragged, the whole GNOME desktop segfaults.
Sometimes Pidgin's glitches making funny stuff happen: my ICQ avatar frequently gets replaced with a photo of some girl - and I've never seen her! I searched my computer for ALL image files and didn't find anything even remotely resembling that avatar.
It's also a great solution if your system doesn't have a DVD reader. I remember installing Ubuntu from an USB thumbdrive (assembeled myself a new computer and didn't have any money to buy a DVD drive) and preparing the drive for installation was a pain in the ass, not to mention that the BIOS refused booting from it 3 out of five times.
I've used Matlab and I think it uses a third-party licensing service, probably FlexLM.